In the 18 months since taking on this role, Mead has powered up the firm’s ability to manage security events — 150,000 per second — by in-sourcing various processes and creating two 24/7 security management centers. A firm believer that “information is power,” Mead is passionate about sharing lessons learned, an obligation he says comes with any IT leadership position, so he speaks frequently at conferences hosted by the SANS Institute, the Association of Information Technology Professionals and others. Mead also believes in empowering young people and is a board member of LeaderSpark, an Ohio organization that helps teens develop leadership skills.
Partridge has led Inovant, Visa’s global IT arm, through a technology upgrade so major that it redefines the reliable, real-time transaction. In 2006 his team completed a five-year upgrade of Visa’s 30-year-old global authorization engine. With the new engine, each of the 100 million transactions Visa processes daily requires only 1.4 seconds, even while accessing back-end Web services such as those for fraud detection. But the $2 trillion worth of transactions Visa processes each year is peanuts compared with the $21 trillion of cash and checks out there, he says. His emerging technology framework should let Visa capture more of that cash market with newfangled payment capabilities and rewards programs. Along the way, he’s redefining IT.
As head IT honcho at the world’s largest automaker, Szygenda’s leadership has helped define IT’s role in the enterprise. In 2006, he was at it again, divvying up a five-year, $15 billion outsourcing contract among six providers. Such outsourcing co-opetition is a strategy he dubbed the “third-generation outsourcing model.” It combines the cost-cutting advantages of outsourcing with the motivational force of competition and could be the next big model for enterprise outsourcing.
> Enterprise network executives
Fred Wettling
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Technology strategy manager
COMPANY
Bechtel
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Wettling carried on as IPv6’s poster child, widely sharing his technical expertise on this next-generation protocol. In the last year, he’s overseen deployment of IPv6 on hundreds of computers on Bechtel’s global network, and is now using IPv6 for routing across the company WAN in several North American offices. Plus he is exploring IPv6 for use in emerging areas of industrial networking, machine-to-machine technology and sensors. “And yes,” he says, “there are several wired and wireless IPv6 network cameras as part of the current pilot.”
